Private mythologies

[Joel]

Running with the idea (from another thread) of people engaging personally with myths from literary sources and investing them with personal significance, how many of us have done this?

Some types of children's fiction strongly encourage it, of course, but so do certain self-contained myth cycles in adult writing, such as those of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. I'm not talking about serious 'belief' in such myths (I don't 'believe' in Moomin Valley, even though I know it is a real place), but rather in a kind of escapist imaginative projection that could range from whimsy through creativity into delusion, depending on mood and circumstances.

For example, I projected my small and useless teenage mind heavily into the Lovecraftian myth cycle for a couple of years when (for reasons I won't explain here) my own circumstances had become fairly unbearable. Ever since, I've been able to escape into that mythic world in times of stress or illness, and always found it a safe house without pain or conflict. I gravely doubt whether Lovecraft intended it to be like that – the cosmos as a comfort zone – though for all his theorising to the contrary, it probably worked like that for him as well.

[Malone]

Lovecraft's private mythology was that of his being an 18th-century gentleman of Providence, one loyal to the King and contempuous of innovation and change. However, he stressed continuously in his letters that his attachment to tradition and culture was solely a means for him to cope within a greater framework of cosmic meaninglessness and did not apply to everyone.

[Masonwire]

Funny you should mention Lovecraft. When I was younger and I was trying to get to sleep, I found it rather comforting to create some kind of adventure involving Lovecraftian elements. It's strange that cosmic horror can/could do that. An explanation could be that I wasn't that aware of the (philosophical) implications of the stories when I made up my own adventures.

[Sand]

I am not sure if this is quite the same as a private mythology, but it is certainly true that I see the world through bookish eyes. I cannot see a lighted house across a field at dusk without thinking of the chateau in Le Grand Meaulnes: I cannot overhear a chance, faintly cryptic remark, without imagining that I might next be plunged into adventures as rare as those in the New Arabian Nights or The Man Who Was Thursday; if I see, as I once did in London, a bearded man in white robes walking steadily along the street bearing a vase of peacock feathers, I naturally assume some strange mystical rite is afoot; if I notice a curious name, like that, once seen, of Boreholme Foot upon a telegraph pole, I naturally suppose there must be a tale attached. The world, in short, is often presented to me as if it were some great unfolding, and as yet unfinished, book. To the extent that it isn't booklike, it lacks allure: fortunately, there always seem to be just enough glimpses to keep the pages turning.

[shivering]

Very interesting topic.

In my youth my personal mythos was a conglomeration of HPL,
Poe, and Tolkien......with HPL and Tolkien being an almost constant.
I spent, to my possible detriment, a great amount of time in that
world. As I got older, bits of Moorcock, PKD, and Zelazny were more
influential (maybe a bit of Harlan Ellison too). Since then my personal
mythos has become an amalgamation of William Gibson, Moorcock's
Jerry Cornelius books, and some Ligotti.

It is interesting, the stories we tell to ourselves.

[Mr. D.]

I want to thank Joel for starting this thread. It has helped me gain an insight into myself, though the insight is opposite of the one so far expressed in the above posts. My life has been much different from the lives of many, if not most of the members of this website. From a pretty young age I have been heavily engaged in the world. Most of my efforts have been aimed at simply earning a living. I am a disappointed student radical from the early seventies. I have been an amateur boxer. I have worked in factories, in a coal mine, as a cab driver and many other jobs. I became a security specialist and worked event security, executive protection, bodyguard work and corporate security. I was a private investigator and repossessed automobiles as well. For the last 21 years I have been a federal law enforcement officer working for Customs. Though I'm good at what I do and have done It was only for money. I never got a degree and had to earn a living.
All of this time I have been a voracious reader. While working all of those back breaking jobs I also acted in 35 plays. I am a musician. I play the bass and guitar. I used to play the trumpet. (If anyone has Martin Committee from the years 1944 to 1956 let me know. I'll make an offer.) Even now, while working 3,000 hours a year, I read about 150 books each year. My interests are more in understanding the sadness and pain of this world more than creating an alternative world. That makes me the opposite of the posters in this thread, but I have not lived a bookish life. It makes sense that I should have other concerns.

[Joel]

Thanks, Mr D. But you're not really the opposite, or you wouldn't be here at all. Your statement "My interests are more in understanding the sadness and pain of this world more than creating an alternative world" is one that most TLO members and the writers they read would agree with. Private mythologies are just part of the imaginative resources we use to manage experience. We should all be open to "creating an alternative world" at some level, whether politically or artistically, because otherwise the one we have is unlikely to change.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Viva June]

My private mythology is one in which I'm a decent sort of person.

[RaleC]

Mr. D, I've charted a professional course just as erratic as your own - digging post-holes on ranches in the US south-west, washing dishes till 2am while attending school, swept floors in studios, worked as chaser/ground crew for a celebrity hot-air balloon service, painted murals around town, measured inseams in a tux rental place, co-wrote behavior management programs with a clinical psychiatrist for children in interum care, volunteered my weekends working as an aid with people incare with disabilities, played in various bands at night, worked in the multimedia dept, whilst simultaneously working as a team leader in sales, at a bank's corporate headquarters, music journalist and photographer, illustrator, trend scout, ghost wrote for AR funded artist demos for label pitches in Australia and London, and now I work as a composer for television, amongst other things - I'll always try something new, and put it back into my work. I've done anything to get closer to my goals - composer of music, and writer - while paying my own way in the world. I never went to college because I didn't have the money - even with 3 jobs at a time. I weight train, box and run 6 times a week. I've done well for thirty-three and look forward to what happens next.

All of these various jobs had their adventures and horrors. And all of them were colored by either the tin Saints and martyrs of the music industry (Arvo Part, Leonard Cohen, Bad Seeds, John Cale, Tangerine Dream &c.) and fiction (Lovecraft, Hemmingway, McCarthy, Melville, Harry Crews &c.)

I don't really remember, but I'd say if I owned a flannel shirt when I was 14 it would have been because of guys like Kurt Cobain. This is the kind of transformative mythology that I was talking about in my previous posts, and Joel is talking about here. Everybody here has similar stories - and it doesn't seem right to demean people for admitting they hold some model of behavior up as a standard, and you don't. It'd be a lie to say no other person or book has ever touched you deeply enough to influence your behavior - I mean, you're here afterall.

To get back to the topic, I'd say Corto Maltese became a big player in the pantheon of my internal skies. When I was living in London I was turned onto the comics (given to me in English, as a birthday gift) because of a superficial resemblance in the way I look to it's lead, an Italian friend still refers to me as "Mal-tez-ay". It's Hemmingway and Conrad with the mysticism of Schulz and the German Romantics:

Corto Maltese - Corto Maltese in Siberia * Part 1 - YouTube

More recently a conjunction of the Philokalia and Andrei Tarkovsky's work utterly transformed the Christian church to me. From pinch-faced and judgmental medieval rage-cult I was raised in to something far more splendid. Is it true? Who cares - for me it is. The historical truth seems to be irrelevant, and gets in the way of it's power as an artistic force for transformation.

Oh, I second the Moominvalley is "real" statement. It is indeed. "The Spring Tune" is the finest statement I've read on what it's like to make "art".

[Jeff Coleman]

Quote Originally Posted by Viva June

My private mythology is one in which I'm a decent sort of person.

I just want to highlight the simple beauty of this statement.